Rant - Fake job interviews

Although I'm currently not actively looking for a new job, I'm always open to talking when other companies approach me with a job opportunity. It's a great way to keep my interviewing skills sharp and also to “feel” the market and keep up with the latest trends.

I'm actually glad I'm not in a big rush to change jobs because, as the story I'm about to share will reveal, things are getting silly and not even job seekers are safe from scammers.

For context, I'm a Project Manager for a tech company and every now and then a recruiter approaches me to discuss a job opportunity. Sometimes the potential job is a good one, sometimes not as much, but I was not prepared for what happened to me the other day.

The setup

I was just minding my own business as I do when this lady approached me on LinkedIn, saying she was a tech recruiter for an early-stage start-up in the health industry, and they were looking for a Project Manager to help build their new product.

Even though now I know these people are scammers, I'll refrain from mentioning the company's name or any of the people involved in this intricate scam. Sorry, I don't want even the slight chance of trouble from this.

Anyways, I responded that I would be glad to talk more to understand if I could help them and if the job was a good match for me, so she sent me a Calendarly link to set up an interview.

So far, so good. That's standard for many companies, so I scheduled an interview for that same week.

The start of the Red Flags

Not long after scheduling the interview, I got the actual invite for the Teams meeting where the interview would take place and that's when the Red Flags started to appear.

The first one was the actual invite for the interview because it came from a @gmail address instead of an institutional one. That fired some alarms for me internally because nowadays it's stupid simple and cheap to get a company account. I'm co-founding a startup, and we are still pre-money and very early stage, and we had an institutional account pretty much from day 1.

Against all my instincts, I decided to accept the invite, and on the day of the interview, I joined the call. I wish I didn't have, because it was a Red-Flag-Fest and a complete waste of my time.

To begin with, my supposed interviewer had his camera off and it remained that way for the whole duration of the interview. That's super weird for online job interviews and was definitely a first for me.

The next Red Flag was the way the guy was going through his questions. The questions themselves actually made sense in the context of the role, but his reactions to my answers did not. It was very robotic, and it seemed like he was just following a script, and none of my answers actually mattered.

And then we come to the magnum opus, the mother of all red flags. If I had any doubts that this interview was a scam, what was about to happen would shatter that once and for all.

After a few minutes of this theatrical back and forth with his robotic questions, he then asked me to share my GitHub user, which I did. He then invited me to the company's repository and asked me to run the code so he could guide me through their product.

Wait a minute... this guy just goes around granting access to the company's codebase to random people without a contract or an NDA? That's crazy! At this point, I had no interest in entertaining this scammer any further, so I just pretended my connection was bad and I couldn't hear them anymore and dropped from the meeting.

The repository that he shared with me actually looked very legit. It had a very convincing file structure and comprehensive documentation. I didn't bother to look deep into the code, but I did a quick online search for "fake interview + github scam," and my suspicions were instantly confirmed. It's a known fact that people are running this kind of scam where they try to bait people into running malicious code to steal data, passwords and whatnot.

That really infuriated me. Not because I lost 30 minutes of my precious time. Sure, that sucked but I knew the situation was fishy and decided to go with it. What really made me mad is that these scammers are taking advantage of people who are often in a vulnerable, if not desperate, situation. If you are unemployed, looking for a job is stressful enough and now people also need to worry that they could be lured into one of these scams. It's just disgusting.

Final thoughts

I'm not happy about wasting half an hour on this, but I hope this article at least helps spread the word and raise awareness of this kind of scam, so no one falls victim to these filthy criminals.

The scam looks sophisticated, but as I mentioned, it had many critical weak spots that allowed me to see it coming from a mile away. I wouldn't be surprised if these thieves up their game to make it more believable, so be careful out there when you are job hunting. Make sure to look into the company and the people you are talking to, and never run any code that you did not write or had the chance to examine carefully.

Posted Using INLEO